Wednesday, July 07, 2004

"Sex without consequences"

Over at Pandagon, they are discussing the real motivations of the abstinence-only crowd. Since their methods are sure to cause an upsurge in unwanted pregnancies and STD's, their motivations can't be reducing those numbers. So what's their real motivations? Well, moralizing and acting superior are cited by a number of people. Making sure that god punishes the sinners by maxing out HIV transmission is considered. (Again, if god wants to strike down sinners, why does he need the Baptists' help? Can't he do it himself?) One poster mentions the ubiquitous tendency to decry people who have sex without consequences.
But why do they care if someone has sex without consequences? Where is it written that sex has to have "consequences"? What the hell does that mean, anyway?
My guess is that the motivations behind the belief that the government needs to be making sure that sex is a profoundly negative thing for young people is two parts jealousy and one part self-righteous pissiness. Brought up to believe that you had to be married to have sex, many of the abstinence-only types did just what they were told. And so sex did have consequences--marriage, mortgage, kids, job, debt, weekly church meetings to bore you to death. And they'll be damned if kids these days are going to escape their miserable fates. And they'll be especially damned if kids who have a little fun in the sack before they take on a lifetime's worth of responsibilities escape without getting sick. Or better yet, having the sudden consequence of a baby that forces the other responsibilities into your life.
But the fact of the matter is that marriage, mortgage, kids, job, debt and boring things are just part of growing up and taking on responsibilities. Sex is knit into the fabric of life and a huge part of it, but it isn't the sole cause of those "consequences" that are the inevitable result of just living. Those of us who have managed to learn about birth control and STD prevention and have sex without "consequences" seem to stumble into those "consequences" anyway.
But I suppose that those who have sex without "consequences" but fall into those "consequences" anyway aren't really getting punished enough. After all, if you have ways of having sex without marriage and children, then marriage and children are a choice you make freely. A chosen baby is not a consequence of sin. And if the fear is, as it seems to be for the Catholic Church, that people won't take on life's responsibilities like having children unless tricked into it by their hormones, well, the evidence that people choose adult responsibilities is right there for the taking. We've had the Pill for more than 40 years, and people are still having babies.
Of course, I think there's more to the whole idea that sex should have "consequences" than simple misery loves company thinking. Without a good dose of sexism, it's hard to whip up some passion for making sure that sex has consequences. It's not all people that should have to suffer for their sexuality; it's women. Removing the "consequence" of unwanted pregnancy from sex was a feminist-driven campaign and still is. And the results in women's lives when they are given the option to have "consequence"-free sex are dramatically feminist. Marriages are post-poned until later in women's lives. Number of babies are limited, freeing women to work. Women make their own money, freeing them from economic dependence on men. Take away the "consequences" of sex and you take away a weapon in keeping men's power over women.
Sometimes it's easy to get lost in amusement/horror over the prudery that attends the abstinence-only thinking and forget exactly what the ultimate goals are when it comes to separating people from contraception. This is about more even than the laudable goals of protecting the health of our young people in school now. This is specifically about making sure that the young women in school now are not being set up to be dependent on the young men beside them in those sex education classes.

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Anonymous said...

Thought experiment: let's suppose that the afterlife is real, and that people can go to either heaven or hell.

More plausibly, let's suppose that morality is real, and that there are good people and bad people. (as for what morality is, and whether the griping about those darn kids having sex has anything whatsoever to do with it, I'm not touching that.)

Now, I think that everyone would agree that the best thing that can happen is that a good person goes to heaven, and I think that everyone would also agree that the worst thing that can happen is a good person going to hell.

Now, the question is, between those extremes, which is worse, a bad person going to hell or a bad person going to heaven?

I think that it's better if bad people go to heaven, too. I wonder, though, if you surveyed liberals and conservatives, you would probably find that liberals wanted bad people to go to heaven more, while conservatives wanted them to go to hell more. In short, I think liberals care mostly about the world being a nice place, whereas conservatives care mostly about people getting what they deserve.

Of course, a radical utilitarian might go further than an ordinary liberal and claim that good and bad people going to heaven are equally good, and good and bad people going to hell equally bad, while an ultraconservative moralist might claim that bad people going to hell and good people going to heaven are equally good, while bad people going to heaven and good people going to hell are equally bad.

Now I feel the need to actually conduct a survey of liberals and conservatives as to whether my little theory about whether it's better for bad people to go to heaven or hell is actually true, since I just asserted it without any support at all :^).

From what I've been reading about conservative thought they seem to have 2 major obsessions:

1) People will never do the right thing unless tricked or coerced to do so. Thus the need of all sorts of laws ,taboos and restrictions to control people's behaviour. This makes sense to a certain extent , after all , how many people would like to legalize murder and rape ? But one of the many problems with this of course is major hypocrisy ,in most conservative and restrictive societies the ruling elite has always exempted itself from these moral directives. In the Victorian era it was perfectly acceptable for a gentleman of means to support a mistress providing he was discreet about it (and it is easier to be discreet in a grand mansion than in a crowded tenement).And when his son was old enough our gentleman would have him educated in the pleasures of the flesh at a fancy bordello. And of course , drugs are not a problem when it's our gentleman's son doing opium but when the middle and working class smokes pot they should be sent to jail. And of course , no matter what happens to Roe vs Wade , discreet (fascinating word , discreet, short form of : with enough money and the right connections you can get away with anything if you're not too blatant about it) abortions will always be available for the wives, girlfriends and daughters of the elite.

2) Society is a "black box" , we do not know what's inside or how it works, so any attempt to tinker with it in the name of progress (social engineering tey call it) would lead to disaster. Again , they exempt themselves from this principle when it suits them. If convincing a sedentary teenager whose biggest form of exersize is to walk from the couch to the fridge that he MUST have that $150 pair of sneakers is not social engineering then I do not know what is. Yet our self appointed guardians of morality never denounce that form of tinkering with the social fabric.

Wives and girlfriends and daughters of the elite were not necessarily able to get abortions on demand, really. That's the whole issue of choice. Those women relied on the connections of the men in their lives to obtain abortion, and I imagine that will be the same if it's made illegal again. It's not about banning abortion, it's about taking the choice from the poor and from women and keeping it in the hands of the powerful. The flip side of illegal abortion is that it is often easier to force on women who don't want them. As long as the paradigm around women's health issues accepts that medical choices are not between a woman and her doctor but between a woman and the court, her husband, her parents, whatever, it is easy to justify refraining from telling women they have inconvienent pregnancies and making them disappear at her family's or husband's request.One thing has certainly changed. Nowadays many women have those connections for themselves and will be able to have whatever they want without relying on a man to get it done. However, those women are still few and far between. Even though the law doesn't really recognize a legally subordinate status for women, one can see what happens under the informal subordinate social status for women. I'm sure many of us have seen women who want abortions be forbidden to have one by parents, husband or boyfriend, a decision to which she gives in because her social structure recognizes their authority. And of course, babies are taken away from women under the same informal authority. Under a return to women's legal subordination of reproductive decisions to others we will see all sorts of outrageous impositions on women's wishes.

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